Editor and author met again the following Monday morning. At that meeting Perkins told Paton, “You are not to worry because you’re not going away with a contract. I don’t see how Scribners could refuse it.” Perkins did not appear so cryptic now, but Paton left for home with only the fuzziest assurances.
During the long voyage, Paton read and reread Thomas Wolfe’s novels. Soon after arriving in Johannesburg, he received Max’s critique of Cry, the Beloved Country. Perkins’s comments on paper were surprisingly straightforward. Paton wrote Burns in April, 1947, and told him that Perkins had said the critics would disparage the story because the final third of the book, the exposition on apartheid, came as an anticlimax after the trial scene, the dramatic peak of the novel. Paton told Burns he thought Perkins was right and stood ready to revise. But the Perkins whom Paton was to experience was a very different editor from the man who had labored so patiently with Thomas Wolfe.
In May, Perkins at last sent Paton the contract for Cry, the Beloved Country. By then Max had come to realize that in the endthe real protagonist is the beautiful and tragic land of South Africa, but if you come to the human hero, it is the Zulu pastor, and he is grand. One might say that the last third of the book is something of an anti-climax, but I don’t think one should look at it in a conventional way. It gives an extraordinary realization of the country and of the race problem, not as a problem but as a situation. It is a sad book, but that is as it should be. So was the Iliad and so is the Bible. But as Ecclesiastes says, “The earth endureth forever.”
Perkins rushed off the manuscript to the printer, then wrote Paton regretfully “that conditions here are such that everything moves very slowly. We do not work enough, that’s the truth-too many holidays, and too short hours.” When Paton admitted he had failed to recognize the importance of the placing of the climax and offered to cut several scenes in the last half of the book, Perkins told him, “It takes so long anyway to publish a book nowadays that I hate to do anything to slow up the progress.” The book was published as written. Perkins was not as demanding of perfection as he once was. Sometimes editing took too much effort now, too much stamina.
Paton resumed his duties in his native land. He wrote Max, “You will be interested to know that you persist in my mind, and that I have a premonition that we shall meet again in the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.”
Cry, the Beloved Country sold exceedingly well and was honored by the critics.
“Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself,” Gilbert Highet wrote in The Art of Teaching. “If you can send him into the world with frames of reference suggested by you and tricks of craftsmanship which he could get only from you, you will have made him your pupil, as much as he will ever be, and earned a right to his permanent gratitude.” Highet cited Perkins in his book as a most “admirable teacher,” commenting that a number of great writers would have wasted their talents had Perkins not shown them “how to direct their Vesuvian force.”
It was in the spring of 1946 that Perkins, whose teaching had been mainly by mail, allowed himself to be recruited as a classroom instructor by Kenneth D. McCormick, the young editor in Manhattan who was conducting an extension course on publishing for New York University. When he invited him to appear as a guest lecturer, McCormick said many years later, “I promised him a class of young hopefuls, and that excited him.”
Storer Lunt, who had recently become president of W. W. Norton and Company, attended the lecture with his company’s vice-president and treasurer, Howard Wilson. Lunt said the whole class sat spellbound, and by the end of the evening Lunt felt they believed as he did, that Perkins “was the embodiment of the perfect editor in his time.”
“His discourse quietly flowed as James Joyce would write,” Lunt recalled, “and I kept thinking now and again of Charles Lamb. Max Perkins was ageless.”
McCormick agreed. “By the end of the evening,” he said, “Perkins had made a total impact. He snowed his audience in the quietest way, without saying a word to polish his own literary reputation.” Over on Broadway, just down the street, Carousel, Oklahoma, Born Yesterday, and The Glass Menagerie were playing. After the lecture, as Howard Wilson and Storer Lunt walked past the theater marquees, the one looked at the other and, speaking of Perkins, said: “That was the best show of the season.” When Perkins had left to catch his train and the students had dispersed, McCormick sat alone in the empty room and thought of something Booth Tarkington had once said, shortly before he died, about how difficult it had become for him to respond to the writing in books he read. “I know all the tricks,” Tarkington remarked; he had spent so many years performing them himself. “In that same way,” said McCormick, “I felt that Max knew all the tricks of his trade and he had grown weary of them.”
Perkins had rushed Paton, a new author, but he still could summon the old energy for his longtime authors like Marcia Davenport. During the first months of 1947, while working on East Side, West Side, she had seen Max several times, mostly for moral support. She told him the book “is too autobiographical fundamentally, and therefore too carefully contrived by me to offset that basic fact, from which I always shy away like a contrary horse. So I am always at war with myself about it and I have a terrible time believing in it.” For the sake of discipline and honoring her word to Perkins, she continued to work on it. At a quarter past four in the morning of April 11, she finished her manuscript, and she brought it to Perkins that afternoon. She realized that he looked tired and frail and was alarmed by the marked tremor of his hands. She thought of how, fifteen years earlier, she had circled the block for two hours before she had dropped off Mozart. “This time,” she told Max, “I am too despairing even to walk around the block. I am just sitting with my head in my hands wondering where I can get a job as a cook.”
Mrs. Davenport wanted to get to Prague; she would revise her book there. Before departing, she stopped off at the Scribner Building to pick up the typescript and Max’s suggestions for the revision, a 3,000-word critique full of support and advice. “I think you have written a notable book in a first draught but that it needs, as any book, to be revised,” he wrote. “The revisions should be almost only a matter of emphasis, for the scheme is right. Having borne the heat of the battle, you must not fail it now.”
East Side, West Side tells the life of a writer named Jessie Bourne during a crucial week in her life, when great changes occur externally and within herself. Perkins’s long letter contained editorial wisdom that applied not only to Mrs. Davenport’s novel but to fiction in general:Generalizations are no use—give one specific thing and let the action say it....
When you have people talking, you have a scene. You must interrupt with explanatory paragraphs but shorten them as much as you can. Dialogue is action....
You tend to explain too much. You must explain, but your tendency is to distrust your own narrative and dialogue....
You need only to intensify throughout what actually is there—and I think you would naturally do this in revision, anyhow. It is largely a matter of compression, and not so much of that really....
You can’t know a book until you come to the end of it, and then all the rest must be modified to fit that.
“You make the work almost do itself,” Marcia Davenport wrote Perkins from Prague. “I think if I had to struggle alone I would give up.” The first week of June, less than a month after she had gone to Czechoslovakia, Perkins received ten revised chapters. THINK FIRST 121 PAGES SPLENDID IN REVISION, he cabled.
“It is so queer about this book,” she wrote Max. “I have never been able to tell anything about it or whether it is a book at all, and I have to go along like a jackass in a hailstorm content that you are on the job.” She asked nothing more of Max than to watch for the Book-of-the-Month Club’s reaction. If for any reason they wanted to take her novel on one of their delayed-action arrangements, she said, which might cause it to come out near the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s new b
ook, she would flatly refuse. “This book is misery enough for me,” she said, “without having it steamrollered by Hem.”
Mrs. Davenport need not have worried. Even though he had written close to 1,000 handwritten pages of his novel, Hemingway was a long way from publication. Perkins still knew little about the book.
The better part of a decade had passed since Hemingway had published any significant work and Max had become pessimistic about Ernest’s future. Astonishingly, he confided to Louise one day that spring, “Hemingway is through.”
In the spring of 1947, William B. Wisdom finally presented to the Harvard College Library the last of the massive collection of Thomas Wolfe material he had been accumulating for almost ten years. It was at once apparent that the perfect person to write an introduction to the papers was Maxwell E. Perkins, Harvard, Class of 1907. Max agreed to prepare an article for the Harvard Library Bulletin.
Stealing odd moments to write, Perkins continued his work with James Jones, who was living in Illinois and inching ahead with From Here to Eternity. Max did not know the book well enough yet to visualize it as a whole, but in a letter that May, he was able to make a few observations. Jones would always remember one of them especially. If an author worried too much about plot, Max said, he might become “sort of muscle-bound,” whereas he must be flexible. “A deft man may toss his hat across the office and hang it on a hook if he just naturally does it,” Perkins wrote, “but he will always miss if he does it consciously. That is a ridiculous and extreme analogy, but there is something in it.”
That letter, full of warmth and belief as well as good advice, meant a great deal to Jones. “It made me feel like one of his boys,” he said. “That did it.”
“I certainly want to come to New York,” Jones wrote Perkins, “at least for a while to see you. I feel there is so much I can learn from you that will help me.” Perkins never received Jones’s letter.
On Thursday, June 12, 1947, Charles Scribner had lunch with Perkins. Max seemed utterly exhausted, as he had all month, full of fits and twitches. But he still refused to take time off. The following day, he had tea with Caroline Gordon Tate. They discussed her husband’s forthcoming volume of collected poems and several anthologies of fiction and essays that the Tates were doing together. That evening, Perkins went home to New Canaan, his briefcase bulging with manuscripts and galley proofs for the weekend’s reading. By Sunday evening he felt uncomfortable enough to complain. He was running a fever of 103, and his cough was bad. He and Louise thought it was an attack of pleurisy. Next morning, despite her protests, Max got up to go to his office. He ran his bath but was barely strong enough to unbutton his pajamas. By that afternoon Louise suspected that he had pneumonia and called an ambulance. As the attendant came upstairs with a stretcher, Perkins carefully instructed his daughter Bertha to take the two manuscripts by his bed—one of them Cry, the Beloved Country, the other, pages of From Here to Eternity-and put them in Miss Wyckoff’s hands, “and no one else’s.” As he was being carried out of the house, he called for the cook, who for years had lovingly catered to his picky eating habits, and she hurried to see him to the door. He looked at her from the stretcher, smiled and said, as though he knew, “Good-bye, Eleanor.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Perkins. You look beautiful,” she assured him.
In truth his face was drawn and wan. He looked like a dying man. Shortly after he arrived at the Stamford Hospital he was found to have an advanced infection of pleurisy and pneumonia. His chest contracted in pain with every cough. Max helplessly thrashed his arms trying to rip away the smothering oxygen tent that enclosed him. “If I could only have a drink!” he kept crying out, knowing that it would loosen him up. But hospital regulations forbade cocktails.
Louise sat at her husband’s side through the night. The doctors predicted Perkins’s recovery, but penicillin proved powerless against his fatigue with life itself. In the early hours of the morning there seemed to be less strain to his uneven wheezing. Louise, sensing it was the end, pulled up closer to the bed and murmured his favorite lines from Shakespeare, the lament from Cymbeline: Fear no more the heat o‘ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Though thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Perkins used to say that he wouldn’t mind being dead but dreaded the process of dying. He drifted in and out of sleep. He was as restless as Tolstoi’s dying Prince Andrei, who, aware of some dreadful “thing” that was forcing its way into his room, crawled out of his bed and propped himself against the door.
Once again it pushed from the outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was death ...
At five o‘clock in the morning of Tuesday, June 17, Max lurched up from his bed as though startled by something that had quietly made its way through the door and was standing, waiting, in the morning’s first light. Only Louise was in the room, but he called out to two of their daughters. “Peggoty! Nancy!” Motioning toward the corner, he asked, “Who is that?” He fell back on the bed and died.
Although everyone at Scribners knew that Perkins had been slowly dying, his death stunned them all. “I never had a better friend,” Charles Scribner wrote Hemingway. On Wednesday, the eighteenth, he assembled the company’s editorial staff and divided up the responsibilities which Perkins had long shouldered. Scribner realized his greatest task was “to do all in my power in the next days to fill the void that he left in our organization.” John Hall Wheelock was to assume most of Perkins’s responsibilities. Fortunately, Wallace Meyer and Burroughs Mitchell, Perkins’s latest choice, were there to carry on. Scribner immediately ordered more young men from the lower floors up to the fifth. The editors wrote to their newly assigned authors and did their best to comfort them. “Fortunately,” Scribner told Hemingway, “the best of [them] have decided that it is now up to them to go on writing and do their best, as that would be what Max would have wished.” Hemingway, who had lost several friends that year, remarked to Charles Scribner that it looked as though “our Heavenly Father was perhaps dealing off the bottom of the deck.” He would honor Perkins five years later by dedicating The Old Man and the Sea to him.
Elizabeth Lemmon had given up astrology years earlier, because of all the disasters she had foreseen in the lives of friends and relatives. The morning after Perkins died, her sister read his obituary in the New York Times and rushed to the Church House. She stood in the doorway of her sister’s bedroom and said nothing more than, “Oh, Beth.” Elizabeth sat up and said, “Max is dead.” Days later she wrote Louise. “I have known people who were considered pillars of strength and loved to be leaned on,” she said, “but Max poured strength into people and made them stand on their own feet.” From that time forth, she kept every letter Max had ever sent her, arranged chronologically, in a shoebox in her bedroom.
At twelve o‘clock on Thursday, June 19, 1947, the funeral of Maxwell Evarts Perkins was held at St. Mark’s in New Canaan. Some of the 250 mourners had to stand outside the crowded little Episcopal church. Evartses and Perkinses were there, along with Scribners and the staff, friends from New Canaan, and many others, including Stark Young, Allen and Caroline Gordon Tate, and Hamilton Basso. Chard Powers Smith said he had “never attended a funeral where so many worldly people were crying and concealing it badly.” Hemingway could not be there because of family obligations. Zelda wrote Louise a letter full of comforting religious sentiments. Marcia Davenport was in Prague finishing East Side, West Side, which she dedicated to Perkins. Taylor Caldwell, upon hearing of Max’s death, collapsed and was sent to the hospital. Max’s friend for more than fifty-five years, Van Wyck Brooks, had been seriously ill himself; he had written Louise that his doctor would not allow him to attend the funeral, but, he said, “I shall be thinking of nothing else,—and I shall think of little e
lse for a very long time.” Perkins was buried that afternoon in nearby Lakeview Cemetery, as was his wish. Later, Louise had a High Mass said for him.
James Jones’s letter arrived at Perkins’s office almost a week after the funeral. When Max’s authors had been divided among the staff, Jones had been overlooked. Not until some days later, when Wheelock wrote him, did he know that Perkins had died. Jones wrote Wheelock back, “I have had the feeling for a long time that I should come to New York, that he might die, that I should not selfishly but for writing go where he was because there was so much that I could learn from him. But as I said, life does not ever put two such things together; his time of that was with Thomas Wolfe and not with me.” For days Jones kept thinking of that phrase that drew him to writing in the first place—“O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost.” From Here to Eternity would not appear until 1951. Its great success was a final confirmation of Max’s gift.
Buried under piles of papers on Perkins’s desk was the Introduction to the Thomas Wolfe Collection that he had written for the Harvard Library and had been going over. As Tom’s deathbed letter to Perkins became his last written words, so did Max’s own memorial to Thomas Wolfe become the final words that he edited.
For months after Max died, Louise was adrift. Unanchored without him, she felt lonely and vulnerable. She began having difficulty falling asleep in the upstairs bedroom she had shared with Max and so had special locks installed on all the doors. She had the whole house renovated, adding a connecting apartment. During this period the Church was her support. She talked of entering a convent. Old friends got letters telling of how she prayed that her husband’s soul would receive the mercy and love of God. Molly Colum wrote Van Wyck Brooks that summer: “She writes like an old nun.... Does Louise really believe she knew as much about God as Max did?”
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